Alice

A 198512" by Full Force, having won a record deal with CBS on the strength of their production work with artistes such as the "latin hip-hop" group Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam. "Alice" came in three flavors: the actual song "Alice, I Want You Just for Me", plus the "Bang! Zoom!" remix and "Ecrof's Special Mix".

The "Bang! Zoom!" may have included Ralph Kramden samples from The Honeymooners at one time, but I'm not sure they would have been allowed to stay in the pressings.

Most of the characters from the book are present but in very unexpected forms. The white rabbit takes the form of a real taxidermied rabbit, the Mad Hatter is a decaying marionette, and the caterpillar is a sock with dentures and giant glass eyes which it sews shut when it sleeps.

Adding to the nightmarish atmosphere of the film, the soundtrack consists of long silences broken up by the louder than life sounds of ratchets, grating metal, and splintering wood. These sounds are intensified by the lack of any kind of musical score.

This is truly one of the best versions of this story that I've ever witnessed.

There are various rumors surrounding Alice. It is rumored that it was nicknamed after a girl named Alice who was the ex-girlfriend of a student who was portraying St. Pat during the various ceremonies one year. For you see it is also rumored that Alice for many years was made of some of the most vile things you could think of, garbage, puke, rancid food, roadkill, etc. Basically the most disgusting things the St. Patrick's Board could find and get away with using. In the last few years of its existence Alice was made by a faculty member who was a chemical engineer and while it still looked disgusting was said to be harmless.

Why is Alice no more? Well you can imagine with the crap that was in this tank not many student knights wanted to be submerged in it. It was the duty of the St. Patrick's Board to grab them and toss them in. This occasionally broke out into fights, but this was tolerated because of the long tradition of the ceremony. A few years ago a student knight broke a leg and some other people got beat pretty good. So the University finally decided to put an end to it.

on December 19, 1992 at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg, the play Alice premiered. All songs were written by Tom Waits. Now 10 years later he has recorded them and released them on the Anti- record label.

"Adult songs for children, or children's songs for adults," is how Tom Waits describes Alice. "A maelstrom or fever-dream; a tone poem with torch songs and waltzes... an odyssey in dream logic and nonsense."

"But I must be insane
To go skating on your name
And by tracing it twice
I fell through the ice
Of Alice
There's only Alice"

(from Alice)

Alice is one of the most wonderful of all Waits' creations. While it sounds similar in tone and content to the Black Rider or even Rain Dogs with its familiar ragged voice, ballads and strange and exotic musings, the disk is a new creation - striped down and bare naked.

Working with his wife and songwriting partner Kathleen Brennan, Waits wrote fifteen songs in the summer of 1992. The Thalia performed "Alice" for eighteen months, with an eclectic orchestra of Waits' design, but Waits didn´t record the music himself for nearly another decade.

"Songs are joining the dream of the listener, and completing a circuit that is really entirely your own," said Waits.

Alice is a character in Scott Adams' comic strip Dilbert. She is one of the trio of main characters, along with Wally and Dilbert. Alice has a personality that naturally compliments Dilbert and Wally. Whenever the Pointy Haired Boss proposes something evil, the characters react in a predictable manner: Dilbert usually earnestly plays along as well as he can, Wally weasels out of the work as cynically and lazily as possible, and Alice either does the work that is expected of her, or reacts with pure fury to the laziness or incompetence of her colleagues, or to anyone else who gets in her way.

Other than her general competence and work ethic, not much is ever discussed about Alice. Like most of the characters in Dilbert, she doesn't have much continuity, and her life outside of work is not really mentioned. She is portrayed as being more socially aware than the male engineers, but as still being something of a geek. However, her character is drawn well enough (so to speak) for the gag oriented nature of the strip.